To get to or leave the Industrial School, a boat was needed.
The boarding school, run for eight decades by the Church c atólica with government funding, was on Kuper Island and the nearest town was Chemainus, 7 km on another archipelago island west of Vancouver, Canada.
Two sisters drowned while trying to escape from school in 1959. But there were so many student deaths there that no one knows for sure if there were more attempts with the same result.
The boarding school was opened in 1847 and throughout almost a century of operation dozens of children died, many of them being buried in graves that never bore their names or had a mark .
The past 13 of July, the Penelakut tribe announced the discovery – in a preliminary way, as the exact number has yet to be determined – of at least 160 burials, which add up to more than 1. 100 what were found in other boarding schools for indigenous children across Canada.
A scandal that has hit the government of Canada and the Vatican for years and that in recent months has been described as an “indigenous genocide.”
Today the Kuper Island Industrial School no longer exists. It was demolished in 1980 .
But what happened on that island shows the assimilation, violence, abuse sexual and deaths without registration of the that thousands of indigenous children were taken from their homes from a very young age.
“The damage caused by the Indigenous Residential School system, individual and systemic violence, persists a lot in the present. The trauma is intergenerational and the indigenous landscapes of this country are populated by the burials of missing children, ”anthropologist Eric Simons, who has worked with the Penelakut tribe in the detection of graves, tells BBC Mundo.
The “Alcatraz of Canada”
A the Industrial School of Kuper Island has called it the “Alcatraz of Canada”, because, as in the famous prison in California, it was practically impossible to escape from there.
The sisters Patricia Marilyn and Beverly Joseph (from 14 Y 12 years respectively) tried in 1959 and drowned , according to n the documentation of the National Center for Truth and Reconciliation, which has 120 names of children killed in that school.
However, it is not known Actually, if more children from the boarding school tried to flee.
It was not something simple: the waters of the place are frozen most of the year and it is in the middle of a depopulated archipelago and with a wide wild fauna, both on land as in water.
In addition to the main building, where the bedrooms and classrooms were, there was a chapel, an auditorium, some fields for sports and other small buildings for daily tasks.
Like one of 130 residential schools that operated between 1847 Y 1996, its mission was the “integration” of indigenous children to the white culture prevailing since the seventeenth century in Canada.
To the island Kuper arrived thousands of children from the province of British Columbia over the course of eight decades.
“I was admitted there in 1930 ”, says Bill Seward, a former student at the Industrial School, in the documentary “Returning to the Healing Circle” performed by Peter Campbell and Christine Welsh at 1997, sponsored by the Canadian Ministry of Indigenous Affairs.
“The only language I knew was my native language. But when he spoke it, he was punished, a lot. There were many nights that I went to bed without dinner, hungry. Many times I was kneeling in a corner, praying and they watching me do it, or if not, there were more punishments “, recalls the old man.
” They threatened my parents that if they did not take me to that school would be jailed. An Indian agent and a policeman came after me, so I had to go. ”
Phil Fontaine explains that being very young, the religious -women and men- who ran this boarding school them made believe that everything in their native culture was evil, sinful.
“The only way to be successful was to be like them, with their values, with their spiritual beliefs, speaking their language. And that’s what all the boarding schools were about. They were designed to assimilate our people into the dominant culture ”, he points out.
At present it is calculated that 150. 000 children were taken from their homes to be obligatorily taken to boarding schools, even until the decade of 1990 .
About 6. 000 died, of which 4. 100 have been identified up to now. And the recent discovery of graves with nameless girls and boys makes one fear that reality has been much more terrible.
“Many did not return to their homes,” Joan said a few days ago Brown, head of the Penelakut nation, from which many children were taken to Kuper Island.
“Those of us who offer help do so knowing that entering into a process of trying to locate the children missing has the potential to re-traumatize. Therefore, we proceed with caution, always following cultural protocols, always in the direction and pace set by our host communities, ”says Simons, who is part of the University of British Columbia.
Abuses that left a mark
Almost 20 years after its demolition, a group of alumni from the Kuper Island boarding school returned to erect a memorial for the fatalities, many of whom were known
They hugged and cried while throwing flowers into the water, as recorded in the Campbell and Welsh documentary.
The isolation was not only marked by the limits of the island Kuper (today called Penelakut), but also by the norms imposed by the Catholic religious to eliminate the native culture of the children.
One of them, the survivors say, was to separate the children who came from the same family or tribe.
“You couldn’t greet your brothers, cousins or acquaintances,” recalls one of them.
But what has left the greatest emotional consequences for many former students were sexual abuse by Catholic religious , whom they called “brothers” .
“They gave you a number, I think mine was 64, and everything had your number, your shirt, your underwear, your jacket ”, says James Charlie, who arrived with his brother at the Industrial School in the middle of the 20th century.
“We used to go to the fields to play, especially on weekends, but when you played, you didn’t really enjoy it, no matter how much you wanted to. When you heard the whistle, a (religious) brother would come out and shout a number, whoever he wanted ”, he describes notably affected by the memories.
“ And you knew very well that that child had to go up and spend the rest of the afternoon with the brother, in his room, to entertain him. You knew well what would happen to that person in that room ”, he relates.
Several of the former students, mainly men, indicate that they have suffered alcoholism, depression and other emotional and behavioral conditions due to the trauma who lived in the Industrial School.
“There was no one to ask for help” , recalls a former student.
For tribal chief Brown, “it is impossible to overcome acts of genocide and human rights violations”
Deaths on the island
Canada’s First Nations (First Nation) have for decades denounced what many of their children experienced in boarding schools, including disappearances and deaths. rts in unknown circumstances.
The efforts of the last two decades have led to the discovery, so far, of more than 1. 100 unmarked graves in which children who never returned home were buried.
The Canadian Truth and Reconciliation Commission (CVRC) arrived to the conclusion in 2015 than 1 of each 50 children who attended school residences died in those institutions . But the Canadian government has not been involved in the search for the remains, so the tribes are l those in charge of the investigations.
In the investigation process, the Penelakut nation has detected, preliminary, some 160 tombs unmarked on the island where the Industrial School was.
“All this has been left largely to the indigenous and their communities, to take care of it, to find out how to address it, heal it and rebuild it,” says Simons.
Even before this, the National Center for Truth and Reconciliation had documented the cases of the two sisters drowned in 1930, a suicide in 1959 and a big fire.
“The students set fire To school in 1896 when the vacation was canceled. An investigation carried out in that year shows that of 461 ex student , 120 died “, he points out.
In addition, in 1995 A former employee – his identity or position is unknown – pleaded guilty to three counts of indecent assault and gross indecency.
For Chief Brown, it is very necessary to “face the trauma caused by these acts of genocide.”
The Vatican has not expressed an official apology, as they have requested for several years the First Nations and the Prime Minister of Canada, Justin Tradeau.
Pope Francis wrote a tweet in June, after the massive tomb finds.
These difficult moments are a strong call to all of us to move away from the colonizing model and walk side by side, in dialogue , in mutual respect and in the recognition of the rights and cultural values of all the daughters and sons of Canada.
– Pope Francis (@Pontifex_es) June 6, 2015
Trudeau pronounced the past 13 July for what happened on the island: “My heart breaks for the Penelakut tribe and for all indigenous communities in Canada.”
“I recognize that these findings only deepen the pain that families, survivors and all indigenous peoples and communities are already feeling and that they reaffirm a truth that they have known for a long time,” he said.
Earlier, in June, he expressed his disagreement with the Vatican: “As a Catholic, I am deeply disappointed by the position that the Church has taken c atolica now and for the last few years, ”he said.
Tribes like the Penelakut say that getting an apology is an important part of the healing process after decades of being ignored.
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